Speak Softly …

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quaker_Gun2.jpg

That’s not a gun, it’s a log painted black. Both sides in the Civil War used “Quaker guns” to frighten the enemy in order to buy time. “We were confronted by a mammoth gun that threatened to blow the Union clear over the north pole,” remembered one Indiana volunteer in 1894. “The mammoth gun proved afterward to be a log that had been mounted and painted to resemble a columbiad.”

Two further Civil War oddities:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Hastings_Sibley.jpg

Each side, improbably, had a general named Henry H. Sibley. Henry Hastings Sibley (left) spent most of the war protecting settlements from the Sioux on the western frontier. He went on to become the first governor of Minnesota. His counterpart, Henry Hopkins Sibley, also served in the west, leading the Confederate States Army in the New Mexico Territory. The two never faced one another.

In July 1863 Union general Edward H. Hobson captured most of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan’s forces at the Battle of Buffington Island in Ohio. Undaunted, Morgan tunneled out of prison and returned the favor, capturing Hobson and about 750 men one year later near Cynthiana, Ky.

| History

The Best Man

Lewis Carroll demonstrates a problem with deciding an election by plurality of votes:

carroll simple majority

Four candidates are ranked by each of 11 electors, and each elector votes for his first choice. “Here A is considered best by three of the electors, and second by all the rest. It seems clear that he ought to be elected; and yet, by the above method, B would be the clear winner — a candidate who is considered worst by seven of the electors!”

“It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book he planned to write on this subject,” writes Michael Dummett. “Such was the lucidity of his exposition and mastery of this topic that it seems possible that, had he published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.”

See The Voting Paradox, The Referendum Paradox, and Stump Trouble.

| Science & Math · Society

Curve Ball

http://books.google.com/books?id=y6oRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

An astronomical oddity, from the Sidereal Messenger, June 1890:

On the evening of April 25th, 1889, at about 8:30 p.m., I was examining Saturn with a power of about 180 on a 4 1/8-inch achromatic by Brashear, when, much to my surprise, I found the shadow of the globe on the rings curved the wrong way, i.e. from the globe, as shown in the following drawing. Thinking my eyes might be deceiving me I called my wife, and without telling her what I had seen, requested her to describe the shape of the shadow. She described the shadow as having its right hand edge curved away from the planet.

I wrote to Professor Comstock of the Washburn Observatory about it, and was informed by him that while my observation of Saturn was unusual, it was far from being unprecedented; that the same appearance was observed in 1875 with the 26-inch achromatic at Washington, and that Webb, in ‘Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes,’ says: ‘The outline of this shadow has often been found curved the wrong way for its perspective.’ Professor Comstock also adds, ‘I do not know that any satisfactory explanation for this anomaly has ever been given.’

William Corliss notes a flurry of similar observations between 1886 and 1914. I think this must have been explained by now, but I haven’t been able to find a source.

(Jenks, Aldro; “On the Reversed Curvature of the Shadow on Saturn’s Rings,” Sidereal Messenger, 9:255, 1890.)

| Oddities · Science & Math

The Piggy Bank

You have 100 coins totaling $5.00. They consist of pennies, dimes, and half dollars. How many of each are there?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Leaving

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Helen Thomas’ husband departs for war, 1917:

After breakfast, while he showed me where his account books were and what each was for, I listened calmly, and unbelievingly he kissed me when I said I, too, would keep accounts. ‘And here are my poems. I’ve copied them all out in this book for you, and the last of all is for you. I wrote it last night, but don’t read it now … It’s still freezing. The ground is like iron, and more snow has fallen. The children will come to the station with me; and now I must be off.’

We were alone in my room. He took me in his arms, holding me tightly to him, his face white, his eyes full of a fear I had never seen before. My arms were round his neck. ‘Beloved, I love you,’ was all I could say. ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ he said, ‘remember that, whatever happens, all is well between us for ever and ever.’ And hand in hand we went downstairs and out to the children, who were playing in the snow.

A thick mist hung everywhere, and there was no sound except, far away in the valley, a train shunting. I stood at the gate watching him go; he turned back to wave until the mist and the hill hid him. I heard his old call coming up to me: ‘Coo-ee!’ he called. ‘Coo-ee!’ I answered, keeping my voice strong to call again. Again through the muffled air came his ‘Coo-ee’. And again went my answer like an echo. ‘Coo-ee’ came fainter next time with the hill between us, but my ‘Coo-ee’ went out of my lungs strong to pierce to him as he strode away from me. ‘Coo-ee!’ So faint now, it might be only my own call flung back from the thick air and muffling snow. I put my hands up to my mouth to make a trumpet, but no sound came. Panic seized me, and I ran through the mist and the snow to the top of the hill, and stood there a moment dumbly, with straining eyes and ears. There was nothing but the mist and the snow and the silence of death.

Then with leaden feet which stumbled in a sudden darkness that overwhelmed me I groped my way back to the empty house.

He was killed shortly after arriving in France. From her memoir World Without End, 1931.

| History

Nothing Doing

Deluged with mail after his discovery of the double helix, Francis Crick began sending a printed card in response to invitations:

crick demurral

He modeled it on a similar one made by Edmund Wilson:

wilson demurral

In 1976 freelance writer Betty Eppes managed to talk to J.D. Salinger for 20 minutes. “He said he didn’t believe in giving autographs. It was a meaningless gesture. He told me never to sign my name for anyone else. It was all right for actors and actresses to sign their names, because all they had to give were their faces and names. But it was different with writers. They had their work to give. Therefore, it was cheap to give autographs. He said, Don’t you ever do it! No self-respecting writer should ever do it.”

See Pen Fatigue.

| Literature · Society

Five Puzzles

  1. In a footrace you overtake the person in second place. What position are you now in?
  2. A clock costs $10 plus half its cost. What does it cost?
  3. A month begins on Friday and ends on Friday. What month is it?
  4. What’s the next letter in this sequence? W T N L I T _
  5. The 22nd and 24th U.S. presidents had the same mother and father but were not brothers. How?
Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Bad Friday

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On July 3, 1863, 20-year-old Pennsylvania seamstress Ginnie Wade was kneading dough in her sister’s kitchen when a bullet pierced the door behind her and passed through her heart, killing her instantly.

She was the only civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg.

| Death · History